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    Beware of Pity
    Beware of Pity
    Beware of Pity
    Ebook480 pages13 hours

    Beware of Pity

    By Stefan Zweig and Anthea Bell

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    'Zweig's fictional masterpiece' GUARDIAN
    'An intoxicating, morally shaking read… A real reminder of what fiction can do best' Ali Smith
    The only novel written by one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century
    In 1913, young second lieutenant Hofmiller discovers the terrible danger of pity. He had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance—so begins a series of visits, motivated by pity, which relieve his guilt but give her a dangerous glimmer of hope.
    Stefan Zweig's unforgettable novel is a devastating depiction of the betrayal of both honour and love, amid the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.
    Translated by Anthea Bell
    Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel, Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. After a short period in New York, Zweig settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateJul 13, 2011
    ISBN9781906548704
    Author

    Stefan Zweig

    Im Gymnasium desinteressiert sein Pensum abarbeitend, entdeckt Stefan Zweig mit der Leidenschaft des Heranwachsenden die Künste für sich. Was mit Lesen, Theater-, Galerie- und Konzertbesuchen beginnt, mündet in profunde Kennerschaft und erste eigene Gedichte. Schon im Alter von 19 Jahren ist er Künstler mit jeder Faser seines Seins - unfertig noch, aber ein Künstler. Am 28. November 1881 geboren, wächst Stefan als jüngerer von zwei Söhnen des begüterten Textilunternehmers Moritz Zweig in Wien auf. Die Familie der Mutter ist international, bei Familientreffen wird Italienisch, Französisch, Deutsch oder Englisch gesprochen. Die jüdische Herkunft spielt dabei keine Rolle, niemand im familiären Umfeld praktiziert die Religion. Erst der gereifte Autor wird sich darüber Gedanken machen, denn auffällig viele der Intellektuellen und Künstler Wiens stammen aus großbürgerlichem, jüdischem Hause.

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    Reviews for Beware of Pity

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    • 4/5
      I could not sleep because I could not stop thinking about how the main story starts off nested into another narrative which it never returns to. I’m not quite sure why this lack of symmetry bugged me. Maybe it’s symbolic of some deep effect the novel had on me that I otherwise cannot access. An honest narrator.
    • 4/5
      Zweig's only completed novel, 'Beware of Pity' is a study of what happens when we let our weakness overpower us, and the terrible consequences that can befall those we show pity to without really meaning it with sincerity. A fine achievement, if a little long - ironic, given the common complaint that Zweig's novellas could do with being longer...
    • 5/5
      9.5
      Soldier in the Austro Hungarian Army in 1914 asks a wealthy girl to dance without realizing she is a paraplegic. He takes PITY on her and visits her daily. She falls in love with him. He has only PITY for her, and is very afraid what OTHERS will say. should he let PITY control his actions and he is very unhappy but she will be happy or should he let his true feelings be known, but she may commit suicide? what is our responsibility to others and to ourselves?
    • 3/5
      Österreich vor dem 1. Weltkrieg. Ein junger k.u.k. Offizier befreundet sich mit einem gelähmten Mädchen. Diese verliebt sich heftig in ihn und er schafft es aus Schwäche und Mitleid nicht, ehrlich mit ihr umzugehen. So kommt es zur Katastrophe.
      Das Thema ist interessant und Zweig schreibt natürlich größtenteils ausgezeichnet. Aber trotzdem hat mir das Buch nicht besonders gut gefallen.
    • 5/5
      Many people lives lives ruled by emotion. This is a novel that questions the wisdom of such an idea.
    • 4/5
      'that compassionate lie had made her happy, and to make someone happy can never be wrong or a crime',, July 1, 2014

      This review is from: Beware of Pity (Kindle Edition)
      This is the story of a dashing young Austrian lieutenant, just prior to the first World War. Stationed on the Hungarian border, he is thrilled to be invited to the castle of a wealthy local family, but bemused when his request to the daughter of the house for a dance is greeted by copious weeping. When he discovers his faux pas - she's a cripple - he feels obliged to send her flowers. And thus begins his link to the family - 'my strange case of poisoning of pity'. For as his feelings of duty and honour are taken to mean much more by the lame Edith, the weak and vacillating Lt Hofmiller is torn between shame before his colleagues at the possible match and his desire to do the right thing. As he is warned:

      'Pity is a double-edged weapon. If you don't know how to handle it you had better not touch it, and above all you must steel your heart against it. Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first...if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.'

      A brilliantly written novel; like his other work, 'The Post Office Girl', Zweig keeps you reading to the end, uncertain how the story will work out.
    • 4/5
      Before the First World War, Hofmiller, a young Austrian officer from a modest background, finds himself stationed in a town where he knows few people. He scores an invitation to the home of the richest local family and, at the end of the evening, realises he has not spent time with their attractive daughter, Edith. He invites her to dance, but realises – to everyone’s horror – that she is sitting in a wheelchair and can’t even stand. The worst faux pas imaginable, and he flees. But he is given another chance, which he eagerly accepts. To be nice he starts spending more and more time with the family, focusing on Edith, keeping her company – keeping himself company too. Relationships seem almost balanced at first. She’s sweet, if a bit over-eager for his attention. It is the father, though, who compels Hofmiller to involve himself more, to help find treatment for her condition, to lie to her about its effectiveness, to let her believe she has a chance of recovery. It’s all, of course, in the name of keeping her happy. Hofmiller’s eagerness to please, Edith’s father’s eagerness to please – beyond what is practical or real – subtly becomes a ticking bomb of anxiety. Where it naturally leads is to Hofmiller’s proposal of marriage. A good soldier, he will do everything he can. Devastation everywhere.
    • 5/5
      the story of a young woman who is a paraplegic as the result of a horse riding accident. and she come to know an officer who has cheered her up after she have been depressed after she knew that she has no hope for her recovery.......
      very sad story
    • 5/5
      The more I read Zweig the more I like his writings. This particular one is a great novel I think. It has a strange beginning- strange because the narrative of the first few pages is ignored in the rest of the novel. It starts as a conversation that a character has with what he thought was a war hero (hero of Austrian army in the 1st world war). The "hero" starts narrating his story and that takes the rest of the book- Zweig never returns to the original character who listened to the story. Kind of strange I thought.

      Nonetheless, the bulk of the story is great. Deals with the feelings and anguish of the young lieutenant who gets involved with a wealthy family, particularly with the crippled daughter, out of pity for the young girl. It's a fascinating novel following up on the sentimental dilemmas that the lieutenant has. At the beginning he is taken away by the fact that the family is treating him not as a soldier but as a real human being. His feelings and thoughts are appreciated by them. As the story evolves he is almost carrying two lives- one with the wealthy family, the Kekesfalvas, and the other with his fellow officers in the barracks who know very little about his doings with the Kekesfalvas, other than he apparently eats there every night and treats him well.

      But as time goes, he realizes that he is driven by pity for the young girl. Also, the young girl has fallen in love with him, a feeling that he can't correspond. So he is torn by these feelings - loyalty to the family, but also repugnance to himself for taking advantage of them.

      This is a great moral story. What is the duty of us humans? Do we only seek our own self-satisfaction or do we sacrifice for others? Especially for those less fortunate who have been dealt an unfair hand.
    • 5/5
      Stefan Zweig's treatise on the dark nature of pity is a fantastic read for several reasons. The plot is a page turner with deeply developed characters such as the narrator, Anton Hofmiller, an Austrian cavalry officer who struggles with the inner voices of pity, honor, and self-indulgence. There is Edith von Kekesfalva the beautiful, tempestuous lame girl whose ambivalence about her plight is the cause of the undoing of multiple characters and Doctor Condor, the physician who espouses fascinating ideas about the medical profession in general and Edith in particular. Those are just three of the characters! The use of language is marvelous, which means that all three of my personal criteria for outstanding literature, plot, character, and language, have been met and then some! 350 pages flew by!
    • 5/5
      This is a story about how “doing the right thing” and trying to be kind can lead to terrible, unintended consequences, and about how difficult it is to choose between the unselfish “should” and the more rational, selfish “want”.

      Anton Hofmiller, a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, is invited to dinner by a rich landowner in the small town where he is stationed. After the meal, to be polite, he asks the teenaged daughter of the house to dance. But he has not noticed she is “crippled” (this is the term used in the book). She is upset and he is embarrassed, and he rushes away. But the family invites him again and again, so he decides the least he can do is keep her company when he can, and he becomes a regular visitor to the house. She, of course, takes it for much more than he does, and is soon fantasizing of their being together once she is “cured”. (We, the readers, realize this will never happen – it is not clear what the various characters believe). He is horrified to learn of her strong feelings, and is also further drawn in by knowingly but unthinkingly fanning her hopes of recovery after a conversation with her doctor. He doesn’t love her, and he knows she will never be cured. He is torn between, on the one hand, his guilt at letting things get this far, coupled with his certain knowledge that the truth could, literally, kill her, and on the other hand his desperate desire to escape the situation by whatever means possible. He goes back and forth, basing his words and actions on these opposing desires. As the book is set in the summer of 1914, we do in fact know how he “escapes”, but we don’t know how the relationship and the story end until we get there.

      In addition to the story, the setting is also great. The small provincial town, the army garrison, constantly training, never fighting. The dinners, the cafes, the card playing, the uniforms, the horses, the regulations, the streets, the boredom, and the mix of nationalities that made up the empire. All very evocative. It reminded me strongly of The Radetzsky March, which I also read this year.

      What really makes this book great, though, is the style. The story is a story, being told some 20 years after the events. Told in the first person by Hofmiller, it isn’t to us, but to another character we meet briefly in a prologue, never to be seen directly again. In fact the whole book begins with a different story, with the narrator telling us that he met a friend who, spotting Hofmiller, told the narrator that he was a famous WWI hero, and told him the story of that heroism. When the narrator meets Hofmiller subsequently, Hofmiller bitterly describes his real, unheroic self, and this is the story of the book. Along the way there are many other “story” episodes – someone tells Hofmiller how the landowner came by his wealth, the girl’s doctor tells of the various cures he has tried on her, another tells how the doctor has married a blind patient he could not cure but did not want to abandon, an ex-colleague who has left the regiment and become rich tells Hofmiller of his terrible troubles along the way, trying to dissuade him from following the same path, and Hofmiller finishes by telling the narrator of his experience of the war and subsequent events. I personally find this a very powerful style, which Zweig adopted very well from his other, all much shorter, works to this, his only long novel. I loved it.

      I don’t know if there is more than one translation, but the one I read was by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt.
    • 4/5
      A great novel, hard to follow for its increasing carrying guilt of the main character.

    Book preview

    Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig

    ‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’

    GUARDIAN

    ‘A book which turns every reader into a fanatic’

    JULIE KAVANAGH, INTELLIGENT LIFE (THE ECONOMIST)

    ‘The most exciting book I have ever read… a feverish, fascinating novel’

    ANTONY BEEVOR, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

    ‘An intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best’

    ALI SMITH

    ‘It’s just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that I don’t already know about this’

    WES ANDERSON

    ‘It really touched me. I’m not an easy crier, not at all. But this book was one of the few moments that I found myself sobbing. It was a knife to my heart’

    SHIRA HAAS, STAR OF THE NETFLIX HIT SERIES UNORTHODOX

    5

    BEWARE

    OF PITY

    STEFAN ZWEIG

    TRANSLATED FROM THE

    GERMAN BY ANTHEA BELL

    PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

    7

    BEWARE

    OF PITY

    8

    9

    Contents

    Title Page

    Foreword

    Author’s Note

    Introduction

    Beware of Pity

    Translator’s Afterword

    About the Authors

    Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press Classics

    Copyright

    10

    11

    FOREWORD

    When Stefan Zweig, forced into a peripatetic life because of the rise of Nazism, arrived in New York in 1935, he was persistently asked to make a statement about the treatment of the Jews in Germany. He refused to be drawn out, and said in correspondence that his reason was that anything he said would probably only make their situation worse. Similarly, when staying in London, he found that while he loved the English way of not getting too het up about things, their civility and general decency, he found the regular denunciations of the Third Reich a little too much—he felt that they lost force by repetition.

    To which one might have countered—one couldn’t say often enough that the Third Reich was evil incarnate. And one would have thought that Zweig, Jewish himself, and fully aware that his books were being burned in university quads all over Germany (and that, given he was probably the most popular author in the world at the time, would have been quite an impressive conflagration in brute terms of scale), might have had more to say publicly on the subject.

    Similarly, Beware of Pity, completed in 1938, and composed over a period of years before the outbreak of the Second World War (there are eleven extant—extant, mind—volumes of notes and drafts which attest to Zweig’s painstaking work on this, his only full-length novel), itself very pointedly has almost nothing 12to say about contemporary times—on the surface, at least. On the surface it is the story of a young Austrian cavalry officer, Anton Hofmiller, who befriends a local millionaire, Kekesfalva, and his family, but in particular the old man’s crippled daughter, Edith, with terrible consequences.

    Well, it almost has nothing to say about the times it was written in. Which means that it has something to say about it; obliquely, and passed across your eyes quickly, like a Hitchcock cameo. But the novel’s very flight from pressing concerns is in itself significant. Of course, Zweig’s temperament was pretty influential here—following Hitler’s rise to power, the first project Zweig embarked upon was a biography of Erasmus, which he described as a quiet hymn of praise to the anti-fanatical man, or, in other words, in direct but non-violent opposition to the loathsome qualities that were becoming deemed desirable, indeed compulsory, in society at large. But sometimes evasiveness isn’t a straightforward matter of wanting to keep out of trouble, or stick up for virtues which are in danger of being trampled.

    One of the earliest writers to note what Freud was doing, Zweig took on board early the lesson that directly dealing with terrible things is not necessarily the way the mind works. His stories are full of characters poisoned by things left unsaid, or situations misread. We tell ourselves stories about what is going on; but sometimes these are the wrong stories. In one of his earlier stories, Downfall of the Heart (whose original title—Untergang eines Herzens—is a proleptic echo of the German title of Beware of Pity—Ungeduld des Herzens, or the heart’s impatience) a self-made businessman succumbs to a terrible decline after seeing, or imagining he has seen, his daughter sneaking out of a man’s hotel room in the middle of the night. And in Beware of Pity we have 13a hero who makes a habit of getting things wrong. Since this seems to be the day for making wrong diagnoses … says the admirable Dr Condor at one point in the novel, but it is the hero (and I had better start using inverted commas around that word, for reasons our hero would most certainly approve of ) who keeps making wrong diagnoses. There is the terrible gaffe he makes which sets the whole terrible train of events in motion (it’s a small train, admittedly, but big enough to cause havoc); there is his initial impression that Kekesfalva is a genuine venerable Hungarian nobleman, that Condor is a bumpkin and a fool; and, in one splendidly subtle piece of writing, in which an interior state of mind is beautifully translated into memorable yet familiar imagery, he imagines himself to be better put together than Condor, when they walk out in bright moonlight on the night of their first meeting:

    And as we walked down the apparently snow-covered gravel drive, suddenly we were not two but four, for our shadows went ahead of us, clear-cut in the bright moonlight. Against my will I had to keep watching those two black companions who persistently marked out our movements ahead of us, like walking silhouettes, and it gave me—our feelings are sometimes so childish—a certain reassurance to see that my shadow was longer, slimmer, I almost said better-looking, than the short, stout shadow of my companion.

    This has a ring of interior psychological veracity, which shows just how sharply Zweig could pay attention to his characters’ inner workings. And if, as Henry James said, a novelist is someone upon whom nothing is lost, then we have in Zweig’s hero here, a man on whom everything is lost. In more than one sense of the phrase. 14

    When we first meet Hofmiller, though, it is not the eve of the First World War, when the events described in Beware of Pity take place, but on the eve of the Second, explicitly, in 1938, when the framing narrator—a famous novelist whom we might as well assume to be Zweig himself—is briefly introduced in a café to Hofmiller by a well-meaning hanger-on (who could also, possibly, be said to be a mischievously unflattering self-portrait of another aspect of Zweig’s personality. He was known for that kind of thing). Hofmiller is a famously decorated soldier, but he obviously treats his decoration—the highest military order Austria can offer, her equivalent of the Victoria Cross—with disdain bordering on contempt, and only speaks to the framing narrator when they meet accidentally at a dinner party later on.

    And it is at this moment that we should realise that the message of the book is not only its ostensible one—that pity is an emotion that can cause great ruin (although this aspect of the book is given greater weight in English, because of its title in translation, the message is delivered firmly and frequently enough in the course of the work)—it is that we must not judge things by appearances. He may be entitled to wear the Order of Maria Theresia but he can tell you that, in his instance at least, what others might regard as courage is actually the result of a monumental act of cowardice.

    Stefan Zweig was hugely famous throughout the world as a writer of novellas and short stories, as well as popular histories and biographies, so it is remarkable that he only wrote one full-length novel. It has led some commentators to suggest that in this instance he overstretched himself, that he became prolix, or, more charitably, that Beware of Pity is actually two novellas of unequal length stitched together. The latter suggestion is certainly worth consideration (how Kekesfalva got his loot is 15certainly a story in itself), but Beware of Pity is the length it is because it has to be (and, as with all Zweig’s writing, it zips along almost effortlessly, like a clear-running stream; it doesn’t read as though it could do with much trimming). The loop back in time that Zweig is taking us on has to be accounted for; it has to take time. He said himself that the impulses behind the novel were not only nostalgia—itself one of the most powerful of narrative impulses, as anyone who has even heard of Proust knows—but pity—pity specifically directed at Lotte, his secretary, with whom he was having an affair, and who was to become his second wife (and with whom he would successfully undertake a suicide pact in a hotel room in Petrópolis, Brazil). Make of that what you will. He wanted this to be the Great Austrian Novel, and so a certain scope was demanded of him.

    And he had to go back to pre-1914. For that was when everything began to go wrong. In his story The Invisible Collection, first published in 1927, a collector of rare prints who has gone blind is deceived by his family—they have sold his valuable collection bit by bit in order to feed themselves, and him, during the disastrous inflation that followed the First World War, and have replaced the prints with blank paper of the same dimensions and thickness. When he strokes the blank sheets the narrator notes his happiness: "Not for years, not since 1914, had I witnessed an expression of such unmitigated happiness on the face of a German …" (Italics mine.)

    It is a scene of such potent and telling symbolism that it verges, tremulously, on the corny. But that is not to gainsay its validity and power. The Great War ruined and erased everything, and reduced the past almost to a state as if it had never been. Zweig’s portrait of pre-war Vienna, The World of Yesterday, is a long lament for a vanished world, tantamount to a suicide 16note. Interestingly—in fact, very interestingly indeed—he does not, in Beware of Pity, allude to, or make any real use of, the atmosphere of stifling sexual repression that animates ‘Eros Matutinus’, one of the best chapters of The World of Yesterday, in which Zweig acknowledges there were some very significant aspects of genteel society the world was right to discard. In fact, if anything, the return to the values of 1913 is tacitly endorsed, albeit in a complex and ambiguous fashion, when Hofmiller discovers, to his horror, that Edith has sexual desires.

    But Beware of Pity ends with a note of almost bitter disillusionment. (Not to mention the reader’s relief at having finally climbed out of an emotional tumble-dryer, which is just the effect Zweig wanted his best work to have.) In fact, if it didn’t sound so off-putting, Disillusionment could be a perfectly plausible title for the novel (to go with Zweig’s other one-word titles for some of his novellas—Amok, Confusion or Fear). But disillusionment is, though often painful—and Beware of Pity has moments of high melodrama that, over seventy years on, still have the power to make one put one’s free hand over one’s mouth as one reads—a very necessary process. And it is a very useful kind of Bildungsroman in which it is not only the chief character who learns something by the end of it, but the reader, too.

    NICHOLAS LEZARD 201117

    18

    19

    AUTHOR’S NOTE

    Ashort explanation may perhaps be necessary for the English reader. The Austro-Hungarian Army constituted a uniform, homogeneous body in an Empire composed of a very large number of nations and races. Unlike his English, French, and even German confrère, the Austrian officer was not allowed to wear mufti when off duty, and military regulations prescribed that in his private life he should always act standesgemäss, that is, in accordance with the special etiquette and code of honour of the Austrian military caste. Among themselves officers of the same rank, even those who were not personally acquainted, never addressed each other in the formal third person plural, Sie, but in the familiar second person singular, Du, and thereby the fraternity of all members of the caste and the gulf separating them from civilians were emphasized. The final criterion of an officer’s behaviour was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book.

    STEFAN ZWEIG

    20

    21

    There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak-minded, sentimental sort, is really just the heart’s impatience to rid itself as quickly as possible of the painful experience of being moved by another person’s suffering. It is not a case of real sympathy, of feeling with the sufferer, but a way of defending yourself against someone else’s pain. The other kind, the only one that counts, is unsentimental but creative. It knows its own mind, and is determined to stand by the sufferer, patiently suffering too, to the last of its strength and even beyond.

    22

    23

    INTRODUCTION

    To him that hath, more shall be given. Every writer knows the truth of this biblical maxim, and can confirm the fact that To him who hath told much, more shall be told. There is nothing more erroneous than the idea, which is only too common, that a writer’s imagination is always at work, and he is constantly inventing an inexhaustible supply of incidents and stories. In reality he does not have to invent his stories; he need only let characters and events find their own way to him, and if he retains to a high degree the ability to look and listen, they will keep seeking him out as someone who will pass them on. To him who has often tried to interpret the tales of others, many will tell their tales.

    The incidents that follow were told to me almost entirely as I record them here, and in a wholly unexpected way. Last time I was in Vienna I felt tired after dealing with a great deal of business, and I went one evening to a suburban restaurant that I suspected had fallen out of fashion long ago, and would not be very full. As soon as I had come in, however, I found to my annoyance that I was wrong. An acquaintance of mine rose from the very first table with every evidence of high delight, to which I am afraid I could not respond quite so warmly, and asked me to sit down with him. It would not be true to say that this excessively friendly gentleman was disagreeable company in himself; but he was one of those compulsively sociable people who collect acquaintances as enthusiastically as children collect stamps, and like to show off every item in their collection. For this well-meaning oddity—a knowledgeable and competent archivist by profession—the whole meaning of life was confined 24to the modest satisfaction of being able to boast, in an offhand manner, of anyone whose name appeared in the newspapers from time to time, Ah, he’s a good friend of mine, or, Oh, I met him only yesterday, or, My friend A told me, and then my friend B gave it as his opinion that … and so on all through the alphabet. He was regularly in the audience to applaud the premieres of his friends’ plays, and would telephone every leading actress next morning with his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he never referred to any poor reviews of your work in the papers, but sent you those that praised it to the skies. Not a disagreeable man, then—his warmth of feeling was genuine, and he was delighted if you ever did him a small favour, or even added a new item to his fine collection of acquaintances.

    However, there is no need for me to say more about my friend the hanger-on—such was the usual name in Vienna for this particular kind of well-intentioned parasite among the motley group of social climbers—for we all know hangers-on, and we also know that there is no way of repelling their well-meant attentions without being rude. So I resigned myself to sitting down beside him, and half-an-hour had passed in idle chatter when a man came into the restaurant. He was tall, his fresh-complexioned, still youthful face and the interesting touch of grey at his temples made him a striking figure, and a certain way of holding himself very upright marked him out at once as a former military man. My table companion immediately leapt to his feet with a typically warm greeting, to which, however, the gentleman responded with more indifference than civility, and the newcomer had hardly ordered from the attentive waiter who came hurrying up before my friend the lion-hunter was leaning towards me and asking in a whisper, Do you know who that is? As I well knew his collector’s pride in displaying his collection, and I feared a lengthy story, I said only a brief, No, and went back to dissecting my Sachertorte. However, my lack of interest only aroused further enthusiasm in the collector of famous names, and he confidentially 25whispered, Why, that’s Hofmiller of the General Commissariat—you know, the man who won the Order of Maria Theresia in the war. And since even this did not seem to impress me as much as he had hoped, he launched with all the enthusiasm of a patriotic textbook into an account of the great achievements of this Captain Hofmiller, first in the cavalry, then on the famous reconnaissance flight over the river Piave when he shot down three enemy aircraft single-handed, and finally the time when he occupied and held a sector of the front for three days with his company of gunners—all with a wealth of detail that I omit here, and many expressions of astonishment at finding that I had never heard of this great man, decorated by Emperor Karl in person with the highest order in the Austrian Army.

    Reluctantly, I let myself be persuaded to glance at the other table for a closer view of a historically authentic hero. But I met with a look of annoyance, as much as to say—has that fellow been talking about me? There’s no need to stare! At the same time the gentleman pushed his chair to one side with an air of distinct displeasure, ostentatiously turning his back to us. Feeling a little ashamed of myself, I looked away from him, and from then on I avoided looking curiously at anything, even the tablecloth. Soon after that I said goodbye to my talkative friend. I noticed as I left that he immediately moved to the table where his military hero was sitting, probably to give him an account of me as eagerly as he had talked to me about Hofmiller.

    That was all. A mere couple of glances, and I would certainly have forgotten that brief meeting, but at a small party the very next day it so happened that I again found myself opposite the same unsociable gentleman, who incidentally looked even more striking and elegant in a dinner jacket than he had in his casual tweeds the day before. We both had some difficulty in suppressing a small smile, the kind exchanged in a company of any size by two people who share a well-kept secret. He recognised me as easily as I did him, and probably we felt the same 26amusement in thinking of the mutual acquaintance who had failed to throw us together yesterday. At first we avoided speaking to one another, and indeed there was not much chance to do so, because an animated discussion was going on around us.

    I shall be giving away the subject of that discussion in advance if I mention that it took place in the year 1938. Later historians of our time will agree that in 1938 almost every conversation, in every country of our ruined continent of Europe, revolved around the probability or otherwise of a second world war. The theme inevitably fascinated every social gathering, and you sometimes felt that fears, suppositions and hopes were being expressed not so much by the speakers as by the atmosphere itself, the air of those times, highly charged with secret tensions and anxious to put them into words.

    The subject had been broached by the master of the house, a lawyer and self-opinionated, as lawyers tend to be. He trotted out the usual arguments to prove the usual nonsense—the younger generation knew about war now, he said, and would not stumble blindly into another one. At the moment of mobilisation, guns would be turned on those who had given orders to fire them. Men like him in particular, said our host, men who had fought at the front in the last war, had not forgotten what it was like. At a time when explosives and poison gas were being manufactured in tens of thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of armaments factories, he dismissed the possibility of war as easily as he flicked the ash off his cigarette, speaking in a confident tone that irritated me. We shouldn’t always, I firmly retorted, believe in our own wishful thinking. The civil and military organisations directing the apparatus of war had not been asleep, and while our heads were spinning with utopian notions they had made the maximum use of peacetime to get control of the population at large. It had been organised in advance and was now, so to speak, primed ready to fire. Even now, thanks to our sophisticated propaganda machine, general subservience had grown to 27extraordinary proportions, and we had only to look facts in the face to see that when mobilisation was announced on the radio sets in our living rooms, no resistance could be expected. Men today were just motes of dust with no will of their own left.

    Of course everyone else was against me. We all know from experience how the human tendency to self-delusion likes to declare dangers null and void even when we sense in our hearts that they are real. And such a warning against cheap optimism was certain to be unwelcome at the magnificently laid supper table in the next room.

    Unexpectedly, although I had assumed that the hero who had won the Order of Maria Theresia would be an adversary, he now spoke up and took my side. It was sheer nonsense, he said firmly, to suppose that what ordinary people wanted or did not want counted for anything today. In the next war machinery would do the real work, and human beings would be downgraded to the status of machine parts. Even in the last war, he said, he had not met many men in the field who were clearly either for or against it. Most of them had been caught up in hostilities like a cloud of dust in the wind, and there they were, stuck in the whirl of events, shaken about and helpless like dried peas in a big bag. All things considered, he said, perhaps more men had fled into the war than away from it.

    I listened in surprise, particularly interested by the vehemence with which he went on. "Let’s not delude ourselves. If you were to try drumming up support in any country today for a war in a completely different part of the world, say Polynesia or some remote corner of Africa, thousands and tens of thousands would volunteer as recruits without really knowing why, perhaps just out of a desire to get away from themselves or their unsatisfactory lives. But I can’t put the chances of any real opposition to the idea of war higher than zero. It takes far more courage for a man to oppose an organisation than to go along with the crowd. Standing up to it calls for individualism, and individualists 28are a dying species in these times of progressive organisation and mechanisation. In the war the instances of courage that I met could be called courage en masse, courage within the ranks, and if you look closely at that phenomenon you’ll find some very strange elements in it—a good deal of vanity, thoughtlessness, even boredom, but mainly fear—fear of lagging behind, fear of mockery, fear of taking independent action, and most of all fear of opposing the united opinion of your companions. Most of those whom I knew on the field as the bravest of the brave seemed to me very dubious heroes when I returned to civil life. And please don’t misunderstand me, he added, turning courteously to our host, who had a wry look on his face, I make no exception at all for myself."

    I liked the way he spoke, and would have gone over for a word with him, but just then the lady of the house summoned us to supper, and as we were seated some way apart we had no chance to talk. Only when everyone was leaving did we meet in the cloakroom.

    I think, he said to me, with a smile, that we’ve already been introduced by our mutual friend.

    I smiled back. And at such length, too.

    I expect he laid it on thick, presenting me as an Achilles and carrying on about my order.

    Something like that.

    Yes, he’s very proud of my order—and of your books as well.

    An oddity, isn’t he? Still, there are worse. Shall we walk a little way together?

    As we were leaving, he suddenly turned to me. "Believe me, I mean it when I tell you that over the years the Order of Maria Theresia has been nothing but a nuisance to me. Too showy by half for my liking. Although to be honest, when it was handed out to me on the battlefield of course I was delighted at first. After all, when you’ve been trained as a soldier and from your days at military academy on you’ve heard about the legendary order—it’s given to perhaps only a dozen men in any war—well, it’s like 29star falling from heaven into your lap. A thing like that means a lot to a young man of twenty-eight. All of a sudden there you are in front of everyone, they’re all staring at something shining on your chest like a little sun, and the Emperor himself, His Unapproachable Majesty, is shaking your hand and congratulating you. But you see, it’s a distinction that meant nothing outside the world of the army, and after the war it struck me as ridiculous to be going around as a certified hero for the rest of my life, just because I’d shown real courage for twenty minutes—probably no more courage, in fact, than ten thousand others. All that distinguished me from them was that I had attracted attention and, perhaps even more surprising, I’d come back alive. After a year when everyone stared at that little bit of metal, with their eyes wandering over me in awe, I felt sick and tired of going around like a monument on the move, and I hated all the fuss. That’s one of the reasons why I switched to civilian life so soon after the end of the war."

    He began walking a little faster.

    "One of the reasons, I said, but the main reason was private, and you may find it easier to understand. The main reason was that I had grave doubts of my right to be decorated at all, or at least of my heroism. I knew better than any of the gaping strangers that behind that order was a man who was far from being a hero, was even decidedly a non-hero—one of those who ran full tilt into the war to save themselves from a desperate situation. Deserters from their own responsibilities, not heroes doing their duty. I don’t know how it seems to you, but I for one see life lived in an aura of heroism as unnatural and unbearable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I could give up parading my heroic story on my uniform for all to see. It still irritates me to hear someone digging up the old days of my glory, and I might as well admit that yesterday I was on the point of going over to your table and telling our loquacious friend, in no uncertain terms, to boast of knowing someone else, not me. Your look of respect rankled, and I felt like showing how 30wrong our friend was by making you listen to the tale of the devious ways whereby I acquired my heroic reputation. It’s a very strange story, and it certainly shows that courage is often only another aspect of weakness. Incidentally, I would still have no reservations about telling you that tale. What happened to a man a quarter-of-a-century ago no longer concerns him personally—it happened to someone different. Do you have the time and inclination to hear it?"

    Of course I had time, and we walked up and down the now deserted streets for some while longer. In the following days, we also spent a great deal of time together. I have changed very little in Captain Hofmiller’s account, at most making a regiment of hussars into a regiment of lancers, moving garrisons around the map a little to hide their identity, and carefully changing all the personal names. But I have not added anything of importance, and it is not I as the writer of this story but its real narrator who now begins to tell his tale.

    31

    BEWARE OF PITY

    32

    33

    The whole affair began with a piece of ineptitude, of entirely accidental foolishness, a faux pas, as the French would say. Next came my attempt to make up for my stupidity. But if you try to repair a little cogwheel in clockwork too quickly, you can easily ruin the whole mechanism. Even today, years later, I don’t know exactly where plain clumsiness ended and my own guilt began. Presumably I never shall.

    I was twenty-five years old at the time, a lieutenant serving in a regiment of lancers. I can’t say that I ever felt any particular enthusiasm for the career of an army officer, or a special vocation for it. But when an old Austrian family with a tradition of service to the state has two girls and four boys, all with hearty appetites, sitting around a sparsely laid table, no one stops for long to consider the young people’s own inclinations. They are put through the mill of training for some profession early, to keep them from being a burden on the household. My brother Ulrich, who had ruined his eyesight with too much studying even at elementary school, was sent to a seminar for the priesthood, while I, being physically strong and sturdy, entered the military academy. From such chance beginnings the course of your life moves automatically on, and you don’t even have to oil the wheels. The state takes care of everything. Within a few years, working to a preordained pattern, it makes a pale adolescent boy into an ensign with a downy beard on his chin, and hands him over to the army ready for use. I passed out from the academy 34on the Emperor’s birthday, when I was not quite eighteen years old, and soon after that I had my first star on my collar. I had reached the first stage of a military career, and now the cycle of promotion could move automatically on at suitable intervals until I reached retirement age and had gout. I was to serve in the cavalry, unfortunately an expensive section of the army, not by any wish of my own but because of a whim on the part of my aunt Daisy, my father’s elder brother’s second wife. They had married when he moved from the Ministry of Finance to a more profitable post as managing director of a bank. Aunt Daisy, who was both rich and a snob, could not bear to think that anyone who happened to be called Hofmiller should bring the family name into disrepute by serving in the infantry, and as she could afford to indulge her whim by making me an allowance of a hundred crowns a month, I had to express my humble gratitude to her at every opportunity. No one, least of all I myself, had ever stopped to wonder whether I would enjoy life in a cavalry regiment, or indeed any kind of military service. But once in the saddle I felt at ease, and I didn’t think much further ahead than my horse’s neck.

    In that November of 1913, some kind of decree must have passed from office to office, because all of a sudden my squadron had been transferred from Jaroslav to another small garrison on the Hungarian border. It makes no difference whether I give the little town its real name or not, for two uniform buttons on the same coat can’t be more like each other than one provincial Austrian garrison town is to another. You find the same ubiquitous features in both: a barracks, a riding school, a parade ground, an officers’ mess, and the town will have three hotels, two cafés, a cake shop, a bar, a run-down music hall with faded soubrettes whose professional sideline consists 35of dividing their affections between the regular officers and volunteers who have joined up for a year. Army service means the same sleepy, empty monotony everywhere, divided up hour by hour according to the old iron rules, and even an officer’s leisure time offers little more variety. You see the same faces and conduct the same conversations in the officers’ mess, you play the same card games and the same games of billiards in the café. Sometimes you are quite surprised that it has at least pleased the Almighty to set the six to eight hundred rooftops of these small towns under different skies and in different landscapes.

    But my new garrison did have one advantage over my earlier posting in Galicia—a railway station where express trains stopped. Go one way and it was quite close to Vienna, go the other and it was not too far from Budapest. A man who had money—and everyone who served in the cavalry was rich, even and indeed not least the volunteers, some of them members of the great aristocracy, others manufacturers’ sons—a man who had money could, with careful planning, go to Vienna on the five o’clock train and return on the night train, getting in at two-thirty next morning. That gave him time for a visit to the theatre and a stroll around the Ringstrasse, courting the ladies and sometimes going in search of a little adventure. Some of the most envied officers even kept a permanent apartment for a mistress in Vienna, or a pied-à-terre. But such refreshing diversions were more than I could afford on my monthly allowance. My only entertainment was going to the café or the cake shop, and since cards were usually played for stakes too high for me, I resorted to those establishments to play billiards—or chess, which was even cheaper.

    So one afternoon—it must have been in the middle of May 1914—I was sitting in the cake shop with one of my occasional 36partners, the pharmacist who kept his shop at the sign of the Golden Eagle, and who was also deputy mayor of our little garrison town. We had long ago finished playing our usual three games, and were just talking idly about this or that—what was there in this tedious place to make you want to get up in the morning?—but the conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down.

    At this point the door suddenly opens, and a pretty girl in a full-skirted dress is swept in on a gust of fresh air, a girl with brown, almond-shaped eyes and a dark complexion. She is dressed with real elegance, not at all in the provincial style. Above all she is a new face in the monotony of this godforsaken town. Sad to say, the elegantly dressed young lady does not spare us a glance as we respectfully admire her, but walks briskly and vivaciously with a firm, athletic gait past the nine little marble tables in the cake shop and up to the sales counter, to order cakes, tarts and liqueurs by the dozen. I immediately notice how respectfully the master confectioner bows to her—I’ve never seen the back seam of his swallow-tailed coat stretched so taut. Even his wife, that opulent if heavily built provincial Venus, who in the usual way negligently allows the officers to court her (all manner of little things often go unpaid for until the end of the month), rises from her seat at the cash desk and almost dissolves in obsequious civilities. While the master confectioner notes down the order in the customers’ book, the pretty girl carelessly nibbles a couple of chocolates and makes a little conversation with Frau Grossmaier. However, she has no time to spare for us, and we may perhaps be craning our necks with unbecoming alacrity. Of course the young lady does not burden her own pretty hands with a single package; everything, as Frau Grossmaier assures her, will be delivered, she can rely 37on that. Nor does she think for a moment of paying cash at the till, as we mere mortals must. We all know at once that this is a very superior and distinguished customer.

    Now, as she turns to go after leaving her order, Herr Grossmaier hastily leaps forward to open the door for her. My friend the pharmacist also rises from his chair to offer his respectful greetings as she floats past. She thanks him with gracious friendliness—heavens, what velvety brown eyes, the colour of a roe deer—and I can hardly wait until she has left the shop, amidst many fulsome compliments, to ask my chess partner with great interest about this girl, a pike in a pond full of fat carp.

    Oh, don’t you know her? Why, she is the niece of …—well, I will call him Herr von Kekesfalva, although that was not really the name—she is the niece of Herr von Kekesfalva—surely you know the Kekesfalvas?

    Kekesfalva—he throws out the name as if it were a thousandcrown note, and looks at me as if expecting a respectful Ah yes! Of course! as the right and proper echo of his information. But I, a young lieutenant transferred to my new garrison only a few months ago, and unsuspecting as I am, know nothing about that mysterious luminary, and ask politely for further enlightenment, which the pharmacist gives with all the satisfaction of provincial pride, and it goes without saying does so at far greater length and with more loquacity than I do in recording his information here.

    Kekesfalva, he explains to me, is the richest man in the whole district. Absolutely everything belongs to him, not just Kekesfalva Castle—You must know the castle, it can be seen from the parade ground, it’s over to the left of the road, the yellow castle with the low tower and the large old park. Kekesfalva also owns the big sugar factory on the road to R, the sawmill 38in Bruck and the stud farm in M. They are all his property, as well as six or seven apartment blocks in Vienna and Budapest. You might not think that we had such wealthy folk here, but he lives the life of a real magnate. In winter, he goes to his little Viennese palace in Jacquingasse, in summer he visits spa resorts, he stays at home here only for a few months in spring, but heavens above, what a household he keeps! Visiting quartets from Vienna, champagne and French wines, the best of everything! And if it would interest me, says the pharmacist, he will be happy to take me to the castle, for—here he makes a grand gesture of self-satisfaction—he is on friendly terms with Herr von Kekesfalva, has often done business with him in the past, and knows that he is always glad to welcome army officers to his house. My chess partner has only to say the word, and I’ll be invited.

    Well, why not? Here I am, stifling in the dreary backwaters of a provincial garrison town. I already know every one of the women who go walking on the promenade in the evenings by sight, I know their summer hats and winter hats, their Sunday best and their everyday dresses, always the same. And from looking and then looking away again, I know these ladies’ dogs and their maidservants and their children. I know all the culinary skills of the stout Bohemian woman who is cook in the officers’ mess, and by now a glance at the menu in the restaurant, which like the meals in the mess is always the same, quite takes away my appetite. I know every name, every shop sign, every poster in every street by heart, I know which business has premises in which building, and which shop will have what on display in its window. I know almost as well as Eugen the head waiter the time at which the district judge will come into the café, I know he will sit down at the corner by the window on the left, 39to order a Viennese melange, while the local notary will arrive exactly ten minutes later, at four-forty, and will drink lemon tea for the sake of his weak stomach—what a daring change from coffee!—while telling the same jokes as he smokes the same Virginia cigarette. Yes, I know all the faces, all the uniforms, all the horses and all the drivers, all the beggars in the entire neighbourhood, and I know myself better than I like! So why not get off this treadmill for once? And then there’s that pretty girl with her warm, brown eyes. So I tell my acquaintance, pretending to be indifferent (I don’t want to seem too keen in front of that conceited pill-roller) that yes, it would be a pleasure to meet the Kekesfalva family.

    Sure enough—for my friend the pharmacist was not just showing off—two days later, puffed up with pride, he brings a printed card to the café with my name entered on it in an elegant calligraphic hand and gives it to me with a flourish. On this invitation card, Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva requests the pleasure of the company of Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller at dinner on Wednesday next week, at eight in the evening. Thank Heaven, I am not of such humble origins that I don’t know the way to behave in these circumstances. On Sunday morning, dressed in my best, white gloves, patent leather shoes, meticulously shaved, a drop of eau de cologne on my moustache, I drive out to pay a courtesy call. The manservant—old, discreet, good livery—takes my card and murmurs, apologetically, that the family will be very sorry to have missed seeing Lieutenant Hofmiller, but they are at church. All the better, I tell myself, courtesy calls are always a terrible bore. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. On Wednesday evening, I tell myself, you’ll go off there again, and it’s to be hoped the occasion will be pleasant. That’s the Kekesfalva affair dealt with until Wednesday. Two 40days later, however, on Tuesday, I am genuinely pleased to find a visiting card from Herr von Kekesfalva handed in for me, with one corner of it turned down. Good, I think, these people have perfect manners. A general could hardly have been shown more civility and respect than Herr von Kekesfalva has paid me, an insignificant officer, by returning my original courtesy call two days later. And I begin looking forward to Wednesday evening with real pleasure.

    But there’s a hitch at the very start—I suppose one should be superstitious and pay more attention to small signs and omens. There I am at seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, ready in my best uniform, new gloves,

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